No Glacial Time for Me.

Weird.

Here I am retired, tons of time on my hands, and I neglect the old blog.

In my defense I have been busy. Hiking, gardening, writing. Also, after our West Virginia vacation (I'll post photos) I got seriously sick. I was sick for weeks. Better now, but it was a horror show.

I've been going through old photos, planning a big trip for next year. Yeah, I know how that goes. Carole and I planned a huge, detailed, complicated trip for this past Spring that was completely botched by Covid-19. But we make more plans anyway. What we hope to do is take some excursions farther afield. At his moment we're looking at Colorado. About a 50-50 chance of that being our destination.

Carole has never seen Colorado. I've only been once, but it was an extended trip and I experienced a lot. One place that I visited that I know she'd love is Rocky Mountains National Park and the adjacent town of  Estes Park, Colorado. Both are her type of place.

At any rate, these are my current musings and this is our thinking for next year when Carole will be very close to retirement herself.

And this is the photo of one of the vistas that made the biggest impact on me when I was in Colorado eight years ago.

This is a glacial moraine. It sits on the flanks of Longs Peak, the highest summit in Rocky Mountain National Park (14,259 feet above sea level). We weren't climbing to the summit on this day, but to a place called Chasm Lake about 2,000 feet or so below the summit. We still had a few miles to go when we stopped at this spot.

I need to try to impress upon you the scale of the landscape here. This is a glacial moraine. A localized glacier once sat at this point and this was its terminal reach. It sat here puking up boulders and rock and soil and sand that it had ground up for thousands of years. And then it melted completely away, revealing this big wall of what is, essentially, glacier vomit. That wall of rock and dirt is huge. Those trees at the base down there are not tiny shrubs. The hills beyond would be considered mountains here in the East.

Another reason this panorama is imprinted on my mind is that it is where I discovered that I am susceptible to altitude sickness. Two years before this trip I had specifically climbed several peaks in Yellowstone over 10,000 feet above sea level to find out if I got altitude sickness, or not. I was pleased then to find then that climbing a summit of 10,500 or 10,700 feet was, to me, no different than hiking up a 6,000 foot mountain here in the South. And so I had concluded that I wouldn't get altitude sickness.

I was wrong. That malady hit me with both fists precisely at this point. I think we were around 11,200 feet here. Up on a big plateau ground out by that dead glacier. I was nauseous, dizzy, addled; my head ached. In fact, the more we pushed on, the worse it got. The weird thing was that I began to babble complete and utter nonsense and realized that I was doing this, but couldn't stop. My hiking companions should have--in retrospect--forced me to turn around. They suggested it, but I refused, wanting to see Chasm Lake in the worst way. So I pushed on. I recall not being with either of them as I clambered up the final wall of rock that served as the dam for Chasm Lake. I was on my own.

At any rate, the pure enormity of the landscape out there is essentially beyond description. You have to experience it.This was a single mountain. Huge like a god. Bits of it so impressive that I was held in place, shocked by the mass of it all.

I want to go back. This time I'll train better and do more to acclimate myself before tackling altitudes over 11,200 feet. (I do fine below that.)

I'm looking forward to it.

A week later, deep in the Weminuche Wilderness of the San Juans.